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haliax

640 karma · joined August 20, 2009

Email is as follows ... hn [at] ksoorya [dot] org
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haliax··on A physicist's guide to ice cream
Where do you get liquid nitrogen as a home cook? I’ve tried to get my hands on both that and dry ice without any luck
haliax··on Merry Christmas Everyone
Polar Bear! He was a Bichon Poodle mix and his tail hadn’t grown in yet so he looked exactly like one of the little polar bears from the Coca Cola commercials
haliax··on Merry Christmas Everyone
Came home from Christmas Eve shopping/sight seeing in Manhattan with my dad and baby sister to find that our mom had gone and gotten us a puppy! I’d never had a dog before. It remains one of the best and happiest memories of my life :)
haliax··on Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation
Really cool, awesome work!
haliax··on Launch HN: Blyss (YC W23) – Homomorphic encryption as a service
Is this FHE or oblivious transfer?
haliax··on Open Source SQL Parsers
For a similar use case, I’ve been considering a combination of s3 exports of db views (mapping private schema to public) + lakeformation governed tables (which allow table, row, and cell level security via iam) + redshift or athena for querying + sts/cognito for authorization to give logged in users a temporary access key id and secret access key. Admittedly an AWS heavy setup, but in my use case that’s an advantage :)
haliax··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
Benepass (YC W20) | Software Engineers, Engineering Manager, and Customer Engineer | Earth (US Timezones) | Full-time | REMOTE (US timezones preferred) | https://www.getbenepass.com Benepass is using modern software and a great UX to transform the $30+ billion benefits industry. We’re displacing incumbents running on manual processes and legacy technology, like fax, checks in the mail, and artisanal CSVs.

In the past year, we’ve grown to cover thousands of lives and signed big customers who are household names. We've found product-market fit and we’re growing at breakneck speed. Our investors include Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and awesome angels like Aaron Levie of Box.

We’re hiring great software engineers for multiple mission-critical roles. Our backend stack is Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, AWS, IaC, & Docker. On the frontend we use Javascript, Tailwinds CSS, React, and React Native (plus a bit of Objective-C and Java when it’s called for).

We offer competitive compensation + equity, flexible PTO, 95% coverage of medical/dental/vision, and fantastic benefits (of course ).

To learn more & apply, visit https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/benepass

haliax··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)
Benepass (YC W20) | Software Engineers, Engineering Manager, and Customer Engineer | Earth | Full-time | REMOTE (US timezones preferred) | https://www.getbenepass.com

Benepass is using modern software and a great UX to transform the $30+ billion benefits industry. We’re displacing incumbents running on manual processes and legacy technology, like fax, checks in the mail, and artisanal CSVs.

In the past year, we’ve grown to cover thousands of lives and signed big customers who are household names. We've found product-market fit and we’re growing at breakneck speed. Our investors include Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and awesome angels like Aaron Levie of Box.

We’re hiring great software engineers for multiple mission-critical roles. Our backend stack is Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, AWS, IaC, & Docker. On the frontend we use Javascript, Tailwinds CSS, React, and React Native (plus a bit of Objective-C and Java when it’s called for).

We offer competitive compensation + equity, flexible PTO, 95% coverage of medical/dental/vision, and fantastic benefits (of course ).

To learn more & apply, visit https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/benepass

haliax··on Ultimate Electronics
Not joking or being sarcastic here, Electronic Circuits for Dummies is great for what you describe.
haliax··on Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
Isn't elixir just syntactic sugar on top of Erlang semantics?
haliax··on New 'unremovable' xHelper malware has infected 45,000 Android devices
Can you elaborate?
haliax··on AI will enable predictive design in creatives
Could you post a link? I'd love to see this.
haliax··on The Ghost in the Machine: An AI Perspective on the Soul [video]
I understand that no one is criticizing reason, I just wanted to understand what alternatives were being proposed.
haliax··on The Ghost in the Machine: An AI Perspective on the Soul [video]
I've been watching this comment thread unfold with a mixture of frustration (it's verging on flamewar) and curiosity.

As someone who is fairly steeped in the rationality-loving tradition and those ways of making sense of the world that are common in tech, I'd ask the following:

Can you or someone else on this thread point to a gentle introduction to the types of thought besides rationality that you're thinking of and how they're grounded? Is it possible for someone who accepts rationality to follow and credit these arguments without having to take any new beliefs as axiomatic?

Put another way, can rationality guide me at least part way to some of these other things?

haliax··on Show HN: I Made the Tinder for Poetry, Quilius
Reposting, as I think I messed up my timing yesterday.

Hi HN! This is a Thanksgiving holiday project I made, inspired by a Robin Sloan novel and the whole "X for Y" thing getting a bit silly :)

It's rough right now, because I wanted to launch something rather than obsess like I usually do.

I'd love to hear what you think!

haliax··on Show HN: I Made the Tinder for Poetry, Quilius
Thanks!
haliax··on Show HN: I Made the Tinder for Poetry, Quilius
Right now it just gets logged, I'm working on a collaborative filtering algorithm now that I have some data.
haliax··on Show HN: I Made the Tinder for Poetry, Quilius
Hi HN!

This is a Thanksgiving holiday project I made, inspired by a Robin Sloan novel and the whole "X for Y" thing getting a bit silly :)

It's rough right now, because I wanted to launch something rather than obsess like I usually do.

I'd love to hear what you think!

haliax··on Kelly Criterion (2007)
The Kelly Criterion is the subject of an absolutely incredible book by William Poundstone called "Fortune's Formula".

In the course of discussing the formula, the book takes you through the birth of the MIT blackjack team, the genesis of statistical arbitrage, and mini biographies of people like Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe. I can't recommend it highly enough.

haliax··on Good Overview of Modern Visual Application Builders?
Retool tryretool.com seems like it'd do the job
haliax··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)
Would love to hear more about this. Email's in my profile :)
haliax··on Launch HN: JITX (YC S18) – Automating Circuit Board Design
Fair enough. I'd love to chat a bit about this -- any chance you'd be willing to move to e-mail? (in my profile)
haliax··on Launch HN: JITX (YC S18) – Automating Circuit Board Design
Is this L.B. Stanza or something else?

Also: this is awesome! I'm a software engineer now working with hardware and built a straw man of this for myself a little while back (a sequence of python functions that generate eaglescript commands to make a PCB), but obviously it didn't even do 0.001% as much.

I checked out your site, but didn't see a way to launch the tool. How can I get access? (I'm working on a side project involving a BLE watch based around the nRF52840).

haliax··on Why not program right?
This sounds cool, can you point me to a good primer on the technique?
haliax··on To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet
This isn't a solution by any stretch but I am curious, what's the stop me using a VPN provider (or an EC2 tunnel, etc) and tunneling all my traffic to prevent slowdowns?

Yes, the ISP could throttle anything they don't recognize, but that seems incredibly risky, given that VPNs are used widely across enterprises in the US, and degrading people's work internet seems like a really terrible idea...

haliax··on Urbit in 2017
What's Momo?
haliax··on The Risk of Discovery
Except that that fails to account for the many devout believers who tried and failed for such enlightenment, or the fact that others have reached great scientific and mathematical heights without being devout students.

Also, having read a fair bit about his life, his scientific and mathematical endeavours were most definitely not secondary to anything.

haliax··on How to Become a ‘Superager’
Even so, given the option to live forever, I wouldn't forgo it so that you could avoid said dread.

Regardless, I don't think that your reasoning about people being set in their ways is valid given significantly longer life or healthspans. A lot of existing conservatism is from people with families (don't rock the boat so I can focus on raising my young!) and people who are suffering the ill effects of aging (don't rock the boat so that I can retire in peace!).

The first group will likely diminish if we have longer healthspans (or else we'll run up against the barriers of overpopulation). Even if not, longer healthspans mean a longer period where people are neither raising families nor mainly preoccupied with living with advanced aging. As a result, I don't think the effect you're describing will be a significant one.

haliax··on If the U.S. Won't Pay Its Teachers, China Will
Would you be willing to cite some of this evidence? That's a conclusion I'd be interested to see...
haliax··on YC's Winter Reading List
I'm about 25% of the way through Strangers.

The negative review you've given seems to be a content-free screed: most of what the writer criticizes is fairly innocuous phrasing (e.g. "my Tea Party friends" rather than "my friends"). The only substantive point is the claim that she lumps people into overly broad categories, but honestly, I've yet to see that. Do you have any sources that dislike the book and point out flaws in her analysis?

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